Miyoko Ito

Months before completing her undergraduate degree, Ito's education was interrupted by Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. She was forcibly sent to Tanforan—a San Bruno horse track converted into an internment camp for Japanese Americans—along with her husband, Harry Ichiyasu, and thousands of others. At Tanforan, Ito taught art classes to fellow incarcerees and was supported by other artists confined there. Released from the camp before her husband, who was transferred to Topaz in Utah, Ito briefly enrolled at Smith College before transferring to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where she received a scholarship. She never formally graduated, but settled in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood and would remain in the city for the rest of her life.

Early work and shift toward abstraction Ito's early practice centered on observational watercolor, shaped by the influence of Synthetic Cubism and the formal precedents of Georges Braque and Hans Hofmann. After arriving at SAIC, she began working in oil on canvas and exploring printmaking, including lithography, which she first encountered as a resident at the Oxbow Art Colony, a summer program in Michigan affiliated with SAIC. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Ito participated in large juried exhibitions across the country, including annual shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the San Francisco Museum of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts—primarily in an anonymous, collective context rather than as a solo practitioner. Mature style By the 1970s, Ito had arrived at the distinctive visual language for which she is best known: glowing, densely layered compositions in which biomorphic and geometric forms hover in ambiguous, richly toned fields of color. Her paintings allude to objects and spaces—windows, vessels, gardens—without describing them directly. "People say my paintings are the act of creation, and they are," she once said. "The paintings are very much a part of life, like breathing." A distinctive feature of her late canvases was her method of attachment: Ito often fastened the canvas edges to the stretcher with nails driven only partway into the wood and stipulated that her paintings be left unframed. This emphasis on the raw materiality of the object complemented the elemental quality of the painted compositions themselves. Ito described influences ranging from Paul Klee to Surrealism to her experience as a Japanese American woman navigating the twentieth century. She worked from a spare bedroom in her family home, describing herself modestly as "a painter wife who has raised two children."

During her lifetime Ito's first significant solo exhibition was held at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago in 1971. The following year, she was included in the landmark exhibition Chicago Imagist Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, though her inclusion owed more to critic and artist Franz Schulze's book Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945 (1972) than to a firm stylistic alignment with the Imagists. In 1973, Ito received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1977 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She participated in the Whitney Biennial in 1975. A retrospective exhibition, *Miyoko Ito: A Review*, was held at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1980, with a catalog essay by critic Dennis Adrian. She was represented by Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and New York from the late 1960s through her death in 1983.

In 1981, Ito joined an informal group of Chicago painters who called themselves the "Allusive Abstractionists." The group—which also included William Conger, Richard Loving, and Frank Piatek—formed to create dialogue around a broader conception of abstraction that included more subjective, metaphorical approaches to painting. Though the artists were visually diverse, they shared a commitment to work that operated through allusion and ambiguity rather than pure formalism.

Ito died in Chicago on August 18, 1983. Her reputation has grown considerably in the decades since, buoyed by renewed scholarly and market interest in artists overlooked during their lifetimes. In 2017, guest curator Jordan Stein organized Miyoko Ito / MATRIX 267 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive—the first solo museum presentation of her work in nearly four decades, and the first ever in Berkeley, where she was born. The following year, Stein brought a version of the exhibition to Artists Space in New York, where he curated it in collaboration with the institution, under the title Heart of Hearts (April 7–May 6, 2018). The Artists Space exhibition received significant critical attention. Coverage included a listing in The New Yorker (May 7, 2018), a review by J. Farago in The New York Times recommending it among the best gallery shows then on view (April 26, 2018), a feature by Andrew Dubin in Frieze (May 1, 2018), and Kim Brandt's inclusion of the exhibition in Artforum's "Best of 2018: The Artists' Artists" (December 2018, Vol. 57, No. 4). Dan Nadel's essay "Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito's Abstract Inventions," published in The Paris Review (May 21, 2018), offered an extended critical assessment of her work to a broad new readership. In 2023, Matthew Marks Gallery in New York mounted a solo exhibition of Ito's work (February 24–April 15, 2023), featuring sixteen paintings and three lithographs spanning the entirety of her career, from 1948 to 1983. Reviews appeared in 4Columns, Hyperallergic, and Two Coats of Paint, among other publications. Jennifer Krasinski wrote in 4Columns that "there is simply no other painter like Miyoko Ito—none, not now, not in her lifetime."

The first monograph devoted to Ito's life and work, Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts, was published in 2024 by Pre-Echo Press—the imprint of artist Matt Connors—and edited by Jordan Stein, with a 1978 interview with the artist conducted by Kate Horsfield. The result of several years of research, the volume features over 100 full-color plates drawn from the artist's mature period, archival materials, and a 5,000-word biographical essay by Stein. It was named a New York Times Best Art Books pick for 2023. The book received widespread praise. Jason Farago wrote in The New York Times that it was "a labor of love from Stein and the painter Matt Connors, who's published it through his own imprint." Vanesa Peterson wrote in Frieze that it was unlikely a better art book would be released in 2024. Beth Williamson described it in The Art Newspaper as "a visual feast" that gave Ito's work proper recognition, and Kitty Grady wrote in The World of Interiors that the book "gets right to the core of the artist, and maybe even further." A review in The Brooklyn Rail called it "a stunning introduction to Ito's mysterious visual realm" and described it as a subtle "reprimand to art history." ---

Ito's work is held in the permanent collections of:

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, New York Art Institute of Chicago Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Philadelphia Museum of Art Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Los Angeles County Museum of Art Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland JPMorgan Chase Art Collection ---

Selected bibliography Adrian, Dennis. *Miyoko Ito: A Review*. Chicago: The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 1980. Barrie, Dennis. Oral interview with Miyoko Ito at the Oxbow Summer School of Painting. Smithsonian Archives of American Art. July 20, 1978. Blumenthal, Lyn, and Kate Horsfield. Interview with Miyoko Ito. Video Data Bank, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1978; re-edited 2014. Frank, Peter. "Miyoko Ito." *ARTnews* (October 1987): 183–184. Gedo, Mary Matthews. "Abstraction as Metaphor: The Evocation Imagery of William Conger, Miyoko Ito, Richard Loving, and Frank Piatek." *Arts Magazine* (October 1982): 112–117. Loving, Richard. "A Passionate Control." *New Art Examiner* (May 1985): 72. Nadel, Dan. "Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito's Abstract Inventions." *The Paris Review*, May 21, 2018. Russick, David. *Miyoko Ito*. Charlottesville: Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 1986. Schulze, Franz. *Fantastic Images: Chicago Art Since 1945*. Chicago: Follett, 1972. Stein, Jordan, ed. *Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts*. Pre-Echo Press, 2024. Upshaw, Regan. "Miyoko Ito at the Renaissance Society." *Art in America* 69 (January 1981): 133. Warren, Lynne. *Art in Chicago, 1945–1995*. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995. ---

Video resources [Jordan Stein on Miyoko Ito: Painting as Place — BAMPFA lecture, December 2, 2017](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7L84ls746U) — Guest curator Jordan Stein discusses the life and work of Ito and shows excerpts from the only known video interview with the artist. [Jordan Stein on Miyoko Ito — Space Making lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABwNEMmJFWA) — Stein explores the construction of physical and psychological environments in Ito's paintings. [Jordan Stein and Chloe Stagaman on Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts — Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment, 2024](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fau58tZHHMg) — Conversation on the occasion of the book's publication. [Miyoko Ito & Her Painting: Exploring How Objects Tell a Story — Illinois State Museum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUp2_7zEfFI) — ISM curator Doug Stapleton examines Ito's painting Sacramento and her biography. [Miyoko Ito: An Interview — Video Data Bank](https://www.vdb.org/titles/miyoko-ito-interview) — The only known video interview with the artist, conducted by Kate Horsfield in 1978 and re-edited in 2014 with support from the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund. [Oral History Interview with Miyoko Ito, 1978 — Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution](https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-miyoko-ito-11656) — Audio interview conducted by Dennis Barrie at the Oxbow Summer School of Painting.